bi

Gartner says “BI must transform and improve businesses”

Peter James Thomas bi and the economic crisis, business, business intelligence, cultural transformation, enterprise performance management, technology , , , , ,

The title is paraphrased. The actual quote, as reported on BeyeNETWORK, is as follows: –

“Organizations will expect IT leaders in charge of BI and performance management initiatives to help transform and significantly improve their business,” said Nigel Rayner, research vice president of Gartner. “This year’s predictions focus on the need for BI and performance management to deliver greater business value.”

To me this immediately suggests one, potentially awkward, question – what on Earth have some BI initiatives been focussed on before 2009 if it was not transforming and improving business?
 

BeyeNETWORK article about the economy and BI

Peter James Thomas bi and the economic crisis, business, business intelligence, enterprise performance management, technology , , , ,

beyenetwork

For obvious reasons, this has become something of a theme recently and is an area that I have touched on in two earlier posts: Will the economic crisis actually be positive for BI? and Pitching BI in difficult economic circumstances.

The BeyeNETWORK article by Nancy Williams provides an interesting perspective and some practical guidance for BI practitioners who are grappling with the current situation. It is and is well-worth reading.
 

 
BeyeNETWORK provides viewers with access to the thought leaders in business intelligence, performance management, business integration, information quality, data warehousing and more.
 
Nancy serves as Vice President of DecisionPath’s Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing Consulting practice. She has more than 17 years of consulting and management experience, and is a highly sought after authority on data warehousing and business intelligence issues. Nancy is a regular instructor at TDWI World and Regional Conferences and has taught the TDWI Fundamentals and Data Modelling courses for a number of Fortune 500 companies and Government agencies. She holds an MBA from the Darden School at the University of Virginia and a BS in Education from the University of Virginia.
 

Pitching BI in difficult economic circumstances

Peter James Thomas bi and the economic crisis, business, business intelligence, enterprise performance management, it business alignment, management information, technology , , , ,
linkedin EPM Business Intelligence

This brief article simply reprises a response I made to a question on the LinkedIn.com EPM – Business Intelligence group (you will need to be a menber of LinkedIn.com and the group to view the link).

The essence of the question was what key BI-related words would resonate with Executive teams. Here is what I said: –
 

“In an unfavourable economic climate, many companies will be thinking first about survival and defensive measures. Only the very best will consider this environment an opportunity, and the very best will already have established BI that this part of their corporate DNA. Let’s rule these paragons out and think about the rest of the herd.

If you are focussed on survival, then it is probably worth extending the metaphor to think about an animal that is in a daily life-or-death situation. It would want to have as much information about impending threats as possible (what can I see?, what can I hear?, what can I smell?, etc.). It will err on the side of caution assuming that half-glimpsed shapes are potential predators and act accordingly. It will want to understand its current environment (how far am I from a place to hide?, are there other animals around who might also be a target – reducing the risk for me?, what is the terrain like and how fast can I move over it?, are there any blind-spots around me?, etc.).

Translating this into a business arena, maybe you can pitch BI by saying that when every penny is precious, having an in-depth understanding of what you do, what it costs, and what value it generates is crucial. Also understanding trends in your book of business is important; am I starting to lose business, if so, what types and why?, are prices eroding, if so, for what products and in which territories?, where are the pain points?, are there any areas that are still doing well that I could focus on more?, etc.

BI can play a major part in identifying what is going well and what is going badly. It can also track the impact of your current tactics, be these aggressive or defensive. Maybe these are some themes that you could pick up on.

When the seas are very rough, having good navigational equipment becomes essential to avoid running aground. “

 

 
My earlier article focusing on whether the economic crisis will be positive for BI may also be of interest in this area.

Since writing this article, I have penned some others in the same area and also found a number of interesting pieces elsewhere on the web. In response to this I have created a WordPress category “BI and the Economic Crisis“, which will hopefully provide a hub for this important area.
 

Sarah Burnett’s predictions for BI in 2009

Peter James Thomas business, business intelligence, technology ,

sarah-burnett

A brief note about an set of predictions for BI in 2009 on Sarah Burnett’s blog, which is always worth reading. She is perhaps more up-beat than I was in my article about BI and the Financial Crisis and it is interesting to get a different perspective.
 

 
Sarah Burnett is a software industry analyst. Her main area of research is Business Intelligence. She am also interested in Public Sector IT and Green IT.
 

Education and cultural transformation

Peter James Thomas business, business intelligence, change management, cultural transformation, education, enterprise performance management, it business alignment, management information, project management, technology , , , , , , , , , , ,

Back in September of this year, Obis Omni were kind enough to invite me to speak at their Forum 2008, which took place on the outskirts of London and had the theme of “Realising Business Intelligence & Corporate Performance Management Success”.

The strap-line of my presentation was “EMIR – A case study in cultural change”. I have written about some of the themes that I discussed at this seminar elsewhere on this blog (e.g. about the importance of promoting your project in Marketing Change and the strong role to be played by extended business teams in Scaling-up Performance Management). In this article I am going to talk about some aspects of the pivotal area of education.
 
Obis Omni
 
Background on The EMIR Project can be found elsewhere on this site. Briefly it was a business intelligence / data-warehousing project aimed at improving the profitability of the European operations of a multinational insurance organisation.

More importantly, EMIR was always seen as primarily a cultural transformation initiative. The explicit aim of the system was to transform the culture of the organisation into one in which the use of credible, timely and easy-to-use information became as much second nature as picking up the telephone. Of course one initial learning here is that if you are in the business of cultural transformation, it helps an awful lot to tell people that this is the case. Having this element as a public goal was of great assistance.
 
 
Making a good first impression

Having already established a strong extended business team (see the links in the first paragraph above) the project team also realised that there was another important group to win over; our first set of 20 or so training delegates. We felt that if they went back to their offices singing the praises of EMIR then this, supported by the voices of the extended team would give us the necessary momentum to carry us through the first training phase and make a great start to our cultural change work.

It is often said (perhaps sometimes glibly) that as much attention should be paid to the deployment of IT systems as to their development. Many IT managers may not truly believe this in their heart-of-hearts, perhaps an “if I build it, they will come” attitude is sometimes more prevalent. However, with the EMIR project we took the educational aspect extremely seriously.

To start with this we made EMIR training a 3-day event, something that was unprecedented in IT training in the organisation. Second, we insisted that all delegates (the senior managers of the European organisation) travel to London to attend the course*. One reason for the duration was that we wanted to cover a lot of ground, but also we wanted to send a message that this was an important event and merited the devotion of an appropriate amount of time.

A lot of effort and thought went into the presentations that would be made, the different styles of training (some lecture style, more hands-on), the quality of the supporting training materials, the arrangement of the rooms and so on. I assigned one of my senior managers to oversee the training and we also employed an external training consultant to help us design the courses and user guides and achieve the professional look that we were going for.
 
 
The importance of real-life examples

Sometimes training simply explains how to use the technical features of a system, but, again, we were in the business of cultural transformation and so this shifted opur emphasis. Because of this, and also because the system was pretty intuitive and easy to use, in training we focussed on using the system to address real-life business problems. One example of this would be estimating the future profitability of a book of business based on historical trends.

This approach meant that the business value inherent in the system was clearly demonstrated. This was not an IT system, it was a business system. A key first step in changing the behaviour of managers was establishing that there was something in it for them; namely that they could get at information that was previously unavailable, that access to information was quick and easy and that their decision-making would be enhanced. Ticking these boxes through our real-life exercises helped to engage the enthusiasm of delegates and made them more receptive to our other proposals for how to build use of the system into their day-to-day lives.

This business-focussed training was initially carried out by our actuaries, however as demand for training soared in later weeks, I also ran many of these workshops. It was potentially a major challenge for an IT person to be telling insurance underwriters how to run their business, but something that I actually enjoyed very much. While discussing training personnel, we always had at least two people present in the classes as well as the lead trainer. The role of these other people was to check that delegates were keeping up and help anyone who was struggling with an exercise. We did not want anyone to fall so far behind that they became disengaged from the programme.
 
 
Breaking the back of cultural change

Our approach worked and our first twenty delegates became converts to the EMIR cause. Before the first training session, delegates has (understandably) been somewhat reluctant to commit so significant a period of time to the training process. After it an example of the type of message that attendees took back with them to their offices was: –

“This is the best management information I have seen, it represents a big leap forward”

It was not all down-hill from this point and a further article will deal with how we sustained cultural change over the latter stages of this project. However, after this initial success, some things became easier and we had safely negotiated what was probably the largest hurdle in the project.

Given this, I was quite happy to release some project funds for champagne at the end of our first three days, but should stress that the project was brought in under budget nevertheless.
 

 
Continue reading about this area in: Sustaining Cultural Change.
 
 
Note: –

* In latter training phases – having succeeded in making our point – training was often carried out in each European country, something I will cover in the future.
 

Anticipation Management

Peter James Thomas business, business intelligence, enterprise performance management, management information, technology , , , ,

Judith Hurwitz

After posting my article about whether the economic crisis will be positive for BI I came across a post on Judith Hurwitz’s blog which was related to this and worth reading. The full article may be read by clicking here and relates to her top technology predictions 2009. The BI-specific piece is number 11. In this Judith predicts demand for software that will enable companies to “anticipate trends and customer needs”.
 

 
Judith Hurwitz is an infrastructure and enterprise software industry analyst and strategy consultant. Her specialties include service oriented architectures, service management, distributed architectures, systems and applications management, information management, collaborative computing and social networking.
 

Holistic vs Incremental approaches to BI

Peter James Thomas business, business intelligence, cultural transformation, enterprise performance management, it business alignment, management information, project management, technology , , , , , , , ,

There is a strong link here to my Vision vs Pragmatism article. In this I argued that Vision and Pragmatism are both essential for the success of any project, be that related to change, to IT, and certainly when using IT to drive change. Unsurprisingly, similar comments apply to whether a holistic or incremental approach to BI is the superior route. However, in this case, I will come down more firmly on the side of one of the options.
 
 
The benefits of an incremental approach

Of course the secret of the success of many projects is their incremental nature. Incremental deliveries, particularly those early on in a project, enable you to do a number of things, including: –

  1. Proving that business value can be added the work that you are doing
  2. Showing tangible evidence of progress
  3. Demonstrating that the project team is responsive to business priorities
  4. Chopping up funding into more digestible parts
  5. Providing early exposure to change management issues; allowing time to learn from mistakes when still operating at on a smaller scale

Overall incremental work can enhance the credibility of a project team and thereby made it easier to secure senior management support. Such work is indispensable to any project.
 
 
How does the sum of the parts measure up?

However there is a point to be made here in favour of a holistic approach which goes beyond my previous preference for always having an overarching vision. This is something that is specific to business intelligence and relates to the nature of information delivery. In a nutshell the sum of several incremental BI developments may be considerably less than the whole if each is not part of an overall strategy.

BI is about having the information necessary to run the business. However, it is also about how that information is delivered and how internally consistent it is. Often BI projects aim to address a fragmentation of existing reporting systems that leads to confusion amongst users and even a general distrust of figures. It is entirely possible to perpetuate this situation, simply replacing older reporting technology with shiny new ones. Each of these new systems may be easier to use that its predecessor and offer significantly greater access to information, but the fragmented nature of information provision will not have been addressed; it may even have been made worse.
 
 
A single platform

The ideal for a BI solution is to have a single platform which supports all pertinent reporting needs. There will undoubtedly be different segments of this, tailored to different groups of users, but these should use subsets of the same dimensions and measures and the same reporting and analysis tools should be used. Adhering to these precepts means that when users of one part of the system need to employ another part, they are not taking a step into terra incognita, but instead are familiar with their surroundings and get the sense that the same logic pervades all of the system.

On a practical level, this approach minimises costs due to software licenses and simplifies your technical architecture, again keeping a lid on expenditure. Fewer people are also needed to both build and maintain a single, central system than many divergent ones. Just as importantly, a single-platform approach means that training becomes focussed on business issues rather than the functionality of a different reporting suites. My experience suggests that, after an initial investment in thorough training for users, introduction of new reporting capabilities can be very smooth and efficient in such a set-up.

Of course developing good BI takes time and effort. Getting to the eventual ideal state that I have described above will undoubtedly take some time (in my most recent BI project it took five years to fully realise). This means that there is no real alternative to the incremental approach that I described at the beginning. However, taking a more holistic approach ensures that your incremental deliveries are aligned with both each other and overall business needs. It also means that with each incremental release there is a related reduction in fragmentation. This is the difference between slowly unveiling a large, coherent edifice and revealing several separate sculptures one at a time.
 
 
The link with cultural transformation

In particular if an aim of your BI project is to transform how users behave (of course this should be a central aim of any BI project, what else is BI for?), then this is going to be most easily achieved with a holistic approach where each phase builds on the success of the previous ones. In this scenario, each incremental delivery can be seen more as extending the remit of your BI system to a new area, rather than adding on a new module. Phase N+1 always reinforces the messages from Phases 1 to N. Each step reduces fragmentation, increases consistency and further improves decision-making. This is the best way to make sure that your BI efforts exceed the sum of their parts, rather than falling short of them. Such a rigorous approach is also the best way to ensure that you meet your cultural transformation objectives.
 

Actionable Information

Peter James Thomas business, business intelligence, enterprise performance management, it business alignment, management information, technology , , , , , , , , ,

sarah-burnett

I was browsing through Sarah Burnett’s blog and came across an article about Actionable Information. I thought that this was making a very strong point about what constitutes good BI and what doesn’t. While BI technologists can become incredibly focussed on the intricacies of warehouse design or complex ETL, it is undeniable that all of this is worthless unless it serves to answer real business questions. You can have a perfect technical information architecture and yet all of your efforts will go to waste if there is not sufficient alignment with what people actually want to report on.

This seems like a really obvious point to make, but during my career I have seen many reporting and analysis systems fail to take it into account and observed their designers consequently scratching their heads over poor usage numbers. Elsewhere I have argued that it is helpful to treat the systems (and the change related to them) like products that have to be marketed professionally. The product analogy works equally well in stating that BI needs to address the requirements of its users, else it will stay on the shelf of the systems’ super market. Sarah makes this point very well in her article and it is one that I will come back to in the future.
 

 
Sarah Burnett is a software industry analyst. Her main area of research is Business Intelligence. She am also interested in Public Sector IT and Green IT.
 

Scaling-up Performance Management

Peter James Thomas business, business intelligence, enterprise performance management, international projects, it business alignment, management information, project management, technology , , , , , , ,

This was the title of a presentation that I made at the Butler Group BI Symposium in London during October. In this article I wanted to focus on just one theme that I discussed; namely meeting the management information needs of a variety of business units, each of which spanned a number of different countries across Europe.

The eight European countries impacted by my BI project

This seems like a very obvious thing to say, but if you goal is to meet the management information needs of a wide range of business units across multiple countries, then it helps to work with quite a few of them to figure out what they want, where this overlaps with your project objectives and how to get everything aligned.

In my experience things have always worked best when the project team have recognised this early on. In a recent European-based project, my team initially spent nine months working with a group of 30 business people from ten different departments and eight different countries (of course this process lasted a total of nine months, we did not lock them up in a room for the duration). We called this group our Extended Team. Part of our work with them was gathering requirements – we started with a blank sheet of paper and asked them what metrics they wanted to run their company. We then went through the painstaking work of better defining these ideas, distilling them down into different themes, making mock-up reports and eventually iterative prototypes. At each stage, we met again with the Extended Team and got their further input.

Now while this is a great way of gathering requirements and ensuring that your product will answer real business questions, it is and even better way to create a core group of business people who feel strong ownership of the product and are proud of their association with it. In turn, this helps amazingly with driving cultural change. On returning to their day jobs after a typical two-day meeting, the members of the Extended Team would be very positive about what they were involved in doing and share their enthusiasm with their colleagues. Momentum starts to gather and you begin to create a buzz about the project.

As well as being the people who helped us to make the eventual business intelligence system user-friendly and business-focussed the Extended Team were also our marketing representatives in the regions and helped to build up positive expectations about the system.

We put a lot of thought into the type of person that we wanted on this Extended Team. We wanted people who were leaders, who were open to doing things in new ways, who were comfortable with technology and who took an analytic approach to their work. This group made a major contribution to the success of the project. It would not have been possible to scale-up our solution without their assistance.
 

 
Continue reading about this area in: Developing an International BI Strategy.
 

Will the economic crisis actually be positive for BI?

Peter James Thomas bi and the economic crisis, business, business intelligence, enterprise performance management, it business alignment, technology , , , , , , ,

This article was prompted to some extent by a discussion posted in the Enterprise Performance Management group on LinkedIn.com (the thread may be viewed here, but you will need to be both logged on to LinkedIn.com and a member of the group to view it).

DJI

The economic turmoil encompassing much of the world is certainly being felt in IT. As one of the largest areas of expenditure in an organisation, IT is always somewhere where it is tempting for those looking to make cuts to start. In many organisations, IT expenditure has been under pressure for many years as rising software costs have taken a larger chunk of overall expenditure. Replacement of obsolete hardware and software is also something that cannot be put off indefinitely and such work often further reduces the CIO’s room for manoeuvre. These factors tend to lead to either stagnant or reducing IT budgets. In some organisations, cuts are “democratically” spread across all areas of IT, but the more sophisticated operators will look to be selective. In this second type of organisation, it has been suggested that business intelligence (BI) may be one of the winners. This article explores this idea.

It is first of all important to realise that sometimes investment in BI is driven by a crisis. When things are going wrong, or have already gone wrong, then the instinctive reflex of CEOs is to want to know both what is happening and why. Often they will find that they do not have the tools in place to answer either of these questions and BI is the best way of addressing this need. In relation to the credit crunch, this type of BI investment can be thought of in the same way that greater focus was placed on control systems and internal auditing in the aftermath of the Enron and WorldCom debacles (they now seem a lifetime away don’t they?).

However, there are some things to be said against this. First, the current crisis is not within a single company, but across virtually all companies. Second, the factors behind the crisis are already apparent: a drying-up of commercial credit as banks do a 180° in their appetite for risk and seek to rebuild devastated balance sheets; and, proceeding from the first factor, a plunge in consumer and business confidence as individuals and companies face – at best – straitened financial circumstances and – at worst – insolvency. Of course the combination of these issues leads to a vicious circle. Good BI is not necessary to qualify these already crystal-clear problems.

Despite the systemic nature of the challenges, companies that have already made investments in BI will have tools at their disposal that are pertinent to navigating some aspects of the current financial difficulties. This should place them at a competitive advantage to organisations that have not been so foresighted. As ever corporate discomfort will not be spread evenly across the board. Whilst all companies will suffer, the strongest ones will suffer least. These organisations may even be able to take advantage of their competitors’ travails to expand market share and attract disaffected customers. One thing that will undoubtedly be a feature of the strongest companies is good BI. These observations may be enough to drive continued support of BI in organisations that already value it, they may even lead to a mild expansion in facilities. But what can we say about those companies that have not already invested in BI?

It is undeniable that creating good BI from scratch is both a lengthy and costly process. I would argue that – in normal circumstances – the payback is extremely positive; indeed BI is one of the highest-yielding types of IT projects. The challenge is that the financial crisis is biting deeply now and BI’s benefits are in the future; at least a year away for most organisations (though it is feasible that some interim solutions to the most pressing questions could be produced more rapidly). Is this a time at which senior management is likely to be receptive to an investment with a medium-to-long term payback, no matter how large that payback might be? The answer to this question probably lies in the degree to which the external crisis has been reflected in an internal crisis. If a company is fighting for its survival day-to-day, then existing BI will be invaluable, but BI with a delivery date in 12 months time is not likely to get very far up the priority list; paying suppliers and staff in the next few days is a more pressing issue.

So my opinion is that there is scope for expanded BI expenditure in those companies that have already made investments, this may be related to specific tools to help take advantage of customers deserting distressed competitors. There is also scope for BI projects to be initiated in companies that are suffering, but whose business is essentially sound. In these types of businesses decisions can still be taken with an eye on the medium term. However a balancing factor is that companies whose future is in the balance are very unlikely to see BI as a major contributor to any short-term turn-around strategy. In these organisations, slashing all IT expenditure is more likely to be the prevailing wisdom.

In aggregate it is difficult to work out the impact of these different trends on the BI market. This will depend sensitively on the triage of companies into the groups identified above. My unscientific sense is that BI may fare marginally better than many other elements of IT, but the overall outlook is negative in the short-term. However, for those companies that survive the down-turn and have not already put a BI strategy in place, it may well be that the area will see renewed interest once the economy reaches calmer waters. This realisation may well arise from noticing how much better those companies with good BI have fared in difficult market conditions.
 

 
Since writing this article, I have penned some others in the same area and also found a number of interesting pieces elsewhere on the web. In response to this I have created a WordPress category “BI and the Economic Crisis“, which will hopefully provide a hub for this important area.